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Posts by Ashley Cooke

World Museum’s great Egyptology collection was created through the generosity of many people, ranging from a Liverpool goldsmith to a peer of the realm. It is 130 years to the day that this nest of 2 coffins arrived in Liverpool. They were given as a gift to the museum by the 8th Earl of Denbigh on 24 November 1881. He had inherited the set from his father-in-law, David Pennant, who had acquired them from his wife’s family, the Spencer-Churchills of Blenheim Palace. Read more…

Work in the Antiquities department of World Museum continues with our drive to create new catalogue records on a new collections database (called Mimsy) to replace earlier inaccurate and incomplete databases. There are over 50,000 items in the collection, so this is quite a challenge but it’s very rewarding when you can share information about the collection with the public. This month graduate student volunteers are recording our collection of funerary scarabs that were once stitched on to the mummy wrappings or incorporated into bead nets placed over the mummy during the Late Period (about 747 – 332 BC). Some of the scarabs have horizontal wings with detailed feathering. The one in this photograph lacks wings but has the most interesting iconography. It’s an oval plaque with a ram headed scarab holding the shen hieroglyphic sign between his hind legs, denoting infinity. There are 27 perforations for sewing round the edge. It was part of the amazing gift of antiquities Joseph Mayer gave to the people of Liverpool in 1867 and it now bears the inventory number M14133. Read more…

A good part of my job as a curator is researching our collections and making information available to the public. Sometimes this work is in response to specific questions and this week I’ve been preparing information about our collection of ancient Egyptian mummies for different researchers who study ancient human remains. There are 7 mummies in the Ancient Egypt gallery at World Museum but you can only see 6 as one of the mummies is within a closed coffin, just like when it was found in a tomb by an archaeologist from Liverpool University in 1905. Read more…

This week World Museum has been hosting two curators from the British Museum who have been cataloguing items from our Egyptology collections. Between 1883-4 the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated the ancient city of Naukratis, a Greek trading post in Egypt. Liverpool was one of over 60 museums that sponsored his work and was rewarded with a small share of the finds that were not kept by the Egyptian authorities. The British Museum is now tracing all of the 13,000 or more artefacts as part of a research and publication project – more details on can be found on their Naukratis website. Read more…

I’ve just given a tour of the Ancient Egypt gallery at World Museum for a group of 30 Egyptology enthusiasts from the University of the Third Age. They were impressed with our display of animal mummies but were shocked to hear of a grizzly tale involving cat mummies being scattered over the fields of Liverpool. On 10th February 1890 an estimated 180,000 mummified cats, weighing 19.5 tons, were sold at auction at the docks in Liverpool. Almost all were crushed and spread on fields like manure but a few were saved and remain in World Museum. They were discovered the previous year at Speos Artemidos in Middle Egypt, when a farmer fell through a hole into a catacomb completely filled with cat mummies.Read more…

Egyptologist Glenn Janes made his final visit to the museum stores last week after cataloguing about 800 shabti funerary figures. He will be working with all the information he has gathered over the summer and then we’ll meet again to discuss publishing parts of the collection. The shabti in this photograph is a close-up of a shabti for a man called Horwedja, a priest of the goddess Neith. He wears a lappet wig and a beard. In his crossed hands he holds agricultural tools: an adze, a hoe and the string of the seed-basket that hangs over the shoulder. If Horwedja was called upon to do work in the afterlife this shabti would have came to life and done the work for him. Horwedja died in about 380-343 BC and was buried in a tomb at a place called Hawara. His name is written in hieroglyphs on the first row of text. You can see 46 shabtis in the Ancient Egypt gallery at World Musuem and you can find out more about shabti figures on Glenn Jane’s website. Read more…

It’s been a good week in the Antiquities department at World Museum. An amazing object in our Egyptology collection that has long been overlooked was published by Dr Aidan Dodson of Bristol University, a Liverpool graduate who is working in the department to study and publish our coffin collection. The mask, with its tiny gold face, is a real rarity for academics and a curious object for the 10s of 1000s of visitors that see it each month. The mask was placed over the head of a mummy over 3500 years ago and is decorated with divine figures to protect the mummy. You can find out more about this mask on the World Museum Ancient Egypt Facebook page. Read more…

Yesterday morning there were 15 eager first year Egyptology students waiting outside the museum doors in the pouring rain. They were here for a museum class translating inscriptions in the Ancient Egypt gallery, all done early in the morning before the museum opens to the public. The group had an hour to make their way round the gallery and translate hieroglyphic inscriptions on a varity of artefacts – wooden coffins and stone stela. Some had to crawl on the floor to read the very bottom lines of text on the coffins. Read more…

Early this morning a team of staff were busy wrapping up showcases and sculptures in the Ancient Egypt gallery at World Museum. The ancient Egyptians had a fondness for wrapping things up and at times it felt like the mummies were looking on with approval. However, I imagine they could have done the job quicker than the 3 hours it took us. Although this was not of a ritual nature and despite having what must amount to several miles of mummy bandages in our collection we used polythene, bubble wrap and foam. Read more…

Glazed faience antquities on display in Paris, including two objects from Liverpool.

The other week I travelled to Paris with some antiquities which World Museum are loaning to the Louvre for their temporary exhibition, ‘Meroë, Empire on the Nile’, which opens on 26th March. This is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Meroë, capital of a great empire on the Nile, situated in northern Sudan. The royal capital of Meroë is famed for the pyramids of the kings and queens who dominated the region between 270 BC and AD 350. Read more…

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